Chemoton

The term chemoton (short for 'chemical automaton') refers to an abstract model for the fundamental unit of life introduced by Hungarian theoretical biologist Tibor Gánti.

Gánti conceived the basic idea in 1952 and formulated the concept in 1971 in his book The Principles of Life (originally written in Hungarian, and translated to English only in 2003).

Due to metabolic reaction, osmotic pressure will build up inside the microsphere, and this will generate a force for invaginating the membrane, and ultimately division.

This is because the chemoton itself can be thought of as a primitive or minimal cellular life as it satisfies the definition of what a cell is (that it is a unit of biological activity enclosed by a membrane and capable of self-reproduction).

[6] As it is scientifically hypothesised that the first replicating systems must be simple structure, most likely before any enzymes or templates existed, chemoton provides a plausible scenario.

But being capable of self-replication and producing variant metabolites, it possibly could be an entity with the first biological evolution, therefore, the origin of the unit of Darwinian selection.

Since the chemoton is a system consisting of a large but fixed number of interacting molecular species, it can effectively be implemented in a process algebra-based computer language.

[11] The chemoton is just one of several theories of life, including the hypercycle of Manfred Eigen and Peter Schuster,[12] [13] [14] which includes the concept of quasispecies, the (M,R) systems[15] [16] of Robert Rosen, autopoiesis (or self-building)[17] of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, and the autocatalytic sets[18] of Stuart Kauffman, similar to an earlier proposal by Freeman Dyson.